bgarrulus

Mortonhall

My sister-in-law said, ‘Get a dog you can pick up,’ but we ignored that. We wanted a proper dog. An artist friend then said, ‘Get a Vizsla, they’re wonderful.’ He’d had two of them as companions while he painted outdoors, so we assumed he knew whereof he spoke. They were definitely proper dogs. His first one had gone ‘sugar-faced’ in her old age – as Vizslas do (see below).

Portrait of the artist’s dog as an old lady.

While mulling over our canine selection we spotted two lovely Vizslas in Stockbridge, trotting along beside their owner, off the lead, and thought, ‘We could do that.’ When we collected Louis aged eight weeks from a breeder near Balmaha we could easily pick him up; but that didn’t last. He shot up and soon weighed 31kg. His energy was boundless.

We went to the recommended puppy classes and followed our instructions to the letter, but Louis’ attention span was short and no amount of the recommended corrective jerking on his lead would keep him to heel for long. If a cat appeared nearby he would lose it completely. If that cat was on the other side of a busy road he would attempt to get at it. The dog trainer’s ‘two short tugs’ on the lead would then evolve into a protracted rodeo act with Louis scrabbling and wheezing and attempting to get off his ‘big angry dog’ bark.

Sans distractions Louis’ recall is actually quite good. He comes bouncing back to my farmer-style whistle and he will sit obediently until given permission to eat his supper. We were never going to ‘hunt, point or retrieve’ with him so it was clear we would need to find some other combination of physical exercise and mental stimulation to drain his energy and engage his restless mind. This would have to take place somewhere away from moving cars. We soon discovered Mortonhall Estate; somewhere we would never have visited without a dog.

The north of the estate, the campsite and kennels, along with ‘*Gun Emplacements (disused)*‘.

The south estate with Morton House, the Crematorium and *Burdiehouse* (Bordeaux House)

Mortonhall estate to the south of Edinburgh was once in the hands of the renowned St Clairs of Rosslyn but passed to the Trotter family in the early seventeenth century. In Greyfriars Kirkyard you can view the ancient Trotter mausoleum.

In the eighteenth century the Trotters built a large and rather plain residence on the site of a previous moated, fortified house. Nearby is an icehouse and a two acre walled garden, which has run to grass. The former garden outbuildings, the glasshouses and boiler houses are all ruinous. One of the lintels over a doorway is dated 1877. The house has been converted to flats and although they still own it, the Trotters are now based at their Berwickshire estate of Charterhall. Access to the facilities is from the south, via an entrance shared with a garden centre just off Frogston Road.

The original grand formal entrance at Kaimes on the east side of the estate featured double lodges flanking a long driveway curving through woodland towards the big house. The lodges were demolished to be replaced by the entrance lodge and driveway to a large crematorium designed by Sir Basil Spence. We have attended too many funerals there; as has most of the population of Edinburgh. Referring to something he considered unlikely of one of my old consultants used to say, ‘I’ll be a puff of smoke going up Mortonhall chimney before that happens.’

The formal gardens once included fountains and statuary and some of the plinths are still there. That garden is now more of a casual arboretum. Many of the trees are very old and very big. Every now and then an ailing giant comes down. The site is surrounded by wet marshy ground and the original tower must have been well defended by its soggy surroundings. Nearby, to the south west is Morton House, the dower house for Mortonhall, which is actually older than the main house.

Before we walked dogs there I felt the garden centre a rather ugly addition to the relocated entrance to the house and grounds, but it is well-run and useful with a passable cafe and farm shop. The entrance is in any case an anonymous utilitarian affair. The stable block, with its enclosed courtyard, includes a pub and restaurant. It affords a cosy winter retreat with its log stove. It is associated with a large, high-quality campsite.

Apart from two ornamental highland bullocks that hang around the fields next to the drive, Mortonhall is all arable. There therefore are no sheep to ‘worry’ about but there are many horses, an example of the now widespread ‘horsey-culture’ as my farmer brother disdainfully calls it. In any case Louis’ principal interest in large herbivores is rolling in their dung. He will chase roe deer, but he gives up quickly.

A massive ancient yew – which looks older than the house.

To the south, the Pentland Hills are marred by Hillend artificial ski slope – described by Rich Hall as ‘the local sport of carpet skiing’. Originally the enormous estate consisted of farms extending from Blackford Pond as far south as the peak of Allermuir at the north-eastern edge of the Pentlands. The family of Robert Louis Stevenson had a holiday home at Swanston Village which lies at the base of the Pentlands, near the ski slope. In Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes, RLS bemoaned the advance of the Edinburgh suburbs which were beginning their long encirclement of the estate.

Caerketton Hill and the ski slopes from Galachlaw. Swanston is in the trees.
Caer is a Welsh prefix meaning fort, showing that Welsh was the ancient language of lowland Scotland – as also seen in the name of Caerlaverock Castle in Dumfriesshire.

The City of Edinburgh, Arthur’s Seat, and the Castle all lie to the north of the estate with the Firth of Forth and Fife beyond that. Mortonhall is part of a wedge of green land extending deep into Edinburgh as far as the Grange. This wedge takes in the rump of Mortonhall estate, the Braid Hills, the Hermitage of Braid, Blackford Hill and several fine golf courses. On the fairways you can still see the ridge and furrow marks, left by medieval ploughing. These features are known as riggs in Scotland. The edges of fields were still referred to as end riggs when I was a boy. Out walking, it is hard to believe you are so near the centre of a major city. Long country walks are possible over a variety of terrain with spectacular views.

North towards Arthur’s Seat from the Braid Hills with harebells in the foreground.

Entrance to the stable courtyard with its guard stones.

The main attraction of Mortonhall is long off-the-lead walks through woods and along the edge of arable fields. Watching the cycle of ploughing, sowing and harvesting is a great pleasure, giving me a connection to the farming year that I lost when I left home.

To the west, the woods of Galachlaw run along the northern boundary of what was once the Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital where I worked for two months of my junior house officer year. It is now a large housing estate which includes the converted residence where I slept while on call and where I once attended a mess Christmas party in 1979. The top of Galachlaw Hill is clothed in mature trees but it is still possible to identify the neolithic cairn marked on the OS maps above. Before the trees took over, the view to the hills would have been splendid. Cromwell’s army of 16,500 troops camped there before the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, a crushing defeat for the Scots who had declared Charles II King after the execution of his father.

The military connection doesn’t end there. As with many large country houses, Mortonhall was requisitioned during both world wars and extensive temporary buildings were constructed in the grounds for accommodation. The remains of these huts in the form of concrete footings and brickwork are everywhere. The huts are visible on the post war aerial photographs available on the National Library of Scotland website.

In World War I the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders were based there. In World War II they housed the Durham Light Infantry. The huts were also used for Prisoners of War, and later displaced persons. It is impossible to look on the overgrown concrete floors and brickwork steps leading nowhere without thinking of the hundreds of souls who have passed through.

To the north east, near Meadowhead Farm lay one of the main anti-aircraft batteries defending Edinburgh in the Second World War. This is the site marked ‘Gun Emplacements’ on the OS map. The associated buildings retain the tall concrete fence posts with the inward-sloping tops that carried the barbed wire. There is an old sentry box at the entrance. These buildings are now a sanctuary for retired racing greyhounds.

Still further to the north is Liberton House, a seventeenth century Laird’s house and a rare survivor. Nearby lies its precursor, the even older, and starkly rectangular, Liberton Tower, which dates to some time before 1453. It is more or less as originally constructed and is now a holiday let – with very small windows considering the remarkable views! Further north still lies the Royal Observatory on the shoulder of Blackford Hill.

We walk the estate several times a week throughout the seasons and Louis gets to run about off the lead. He chases squirrels endlessly but with only one disconcerting success in seven years. Perhaps the pursuit is the real pleasure. We are are on an affable chatting basis with several other dog owners whom we meet there regularly. None of us are very keen on the commercial dog walkers who turn up in their white vans with the inevitable punning titles displayed on the sides. The vans usually contain more dogs than an individual can safely manage.

The grounds of Mortonhall are lovely in all seasons but are at their most enchanting in winter as the autumn colours give way to snow with its blue shadows. Some seasonal shots and a painting by my wife Catherine are included below…

Becoming a Haruspex I

In 1977 I went to New York to do a six-week student elective in gastroenterology at New York University. I arrived in the middle of a heatwave. The blackout that year had resulted in widespread looting; the Bronx was ‘burning’ due to insurance fires; the police were on strike and picketing the Brooklyn Bridge and David ‘Son of Sam’ Berkowitz, the .44 caliber killer, was shooting courting couples at random. His arrest for an unpaid parking ticket was imminent.

The placement was at Bellevue Hospital, a name forever associated with the notorious psychiatric wards. In fact Bellevue was also a general hospital housed then in an enormous brutalist block known as ‘The Cube’. The original infamous Bellevue building next door was being demolished while I was there but I managed to get into it and wander the deserted corridors looking for ghosts. When I heard some raucous voices coming from one of the abandoned rooms my courage deserted me. I fled back to the relative safety of the Cube with its handcuffed prisoners and armed police guards.

Bellevue was a public hospital paired with the private University Hospital known as UH. It lies at the east end of 28th Street between 1st Avenue and the FDR Drive. The UN Building is a few blocks to the north. Ward rounds started very early in Bellevue so that the attending physicians (consultants) could make their way along the underground passage from to UH – where the money was. In the UH lobby hung an Andrew Wyeth and a very expensive car showroom was close by. Despite these signs of opulence New York was in severe decline then.

Through an acquaintance with connections in Philadelphia I also spent some time in that city. It was noticeably less crazy than NYC. As a result I met someone who would become a lifelong friend. Al Dorof was living in an apartment on Delancey Place, a gorgeous mid-nineteenth century tree-lined street that has featured as a location in several films including Trading Places. It is amongst the most prestigious addresses in Philadelphia. The fabulous Rosenbach Museum of literary memorabilia is there. Delancey Place has hitching posts and mounting blocks and is older than many of the streets of Edinburgh’s New Town.

The palatial townhouse was divided into flats with a communal kitchen in the basement. Those Philadelphia contacts who introduced me to Al had prevailed on him to put me up for the weekend. We got on very well and I returned to Philadelphia to stay with him when my elective in New York finished. Also staying at Delancey Place was Larry, an acquaintance of Al, who was a radiologist.

One evening Larry came home from the hospital and said, ‘Look what I had to report this morning.’ He propped a frontal skull view against a lampshade and invited us to inspect it. There was a dense round structure projected over the exact centre of the frontal bone (the forehead). Then he showed us the lateral. A faint linear shadow could be seen traversing the skull from front to back, terminating in a triangular metallic structure just above the pituitary fossa. It was an arrowhead mounted on a wooden shaft. Along the line of the shaft tiny fragments of bone and pockets of gas were visible that had been carried in from the entry point. An endotracheal tube was visible in the pharynx indicating the patient was on a ventilator.

‘That is some shot!’ I said, appalled. ‘Well, not exactly,’ said Larry. ‘He was a teenage boy who had an argument with his brother. His brother waited until he was asleep then crept up on him and fired a hunting arrow into his head from point blank range. He made it to hospital but died soon after the radiograph was taken.’ It was the first of many ‘foreign bodies’ I would see on radiographs.

Years after Al and I first met I was on a flight from Philadelphia to Chicago. I had been visiting Al for a week before going on to the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) conference in Chicago. I found myself sitting in the row behind Larry and made myself known to him. By then I was a consultant in Edinburgh and he was running a large imaging practice in Philadelphia. I reminded him of the skull radiograph and told him this early experience of forensic radiology had ‘stuck in my mind.’

American radiologists in private practice would attend the RSNA with a cheque book in the back pocket of their jeans ready to buy a CT scanner – or two. They were fêted by the equipment reps and for a week the Chicago restaurants did a roaring trade.

In 1984, seven years after my student elective, I started training as a radiologist. After the rudderless ambiguity of my year in psychiatry it was a relief to enter the precise anatomical world of imaging. The plumbing, wiring and scaffolding of the human body is a philosophy-free zone. Clinical radiology is mostly a diagnostic service used by many different disciplines, but the rise of interventional radiology, in which imaging techniques are used to perform physical treatments rather than diagnosis, has been one of the wonders of modern medicine.

As an ex-physician, the only radiology I had been ‘exposed’ to prior to this were chest X-rays. In the acute care setting I thought I could tell cardiac failure from pneumonia and I’d picked up one or two pneumothoraces (collapsed lungs), one caused by me in the course of inserting a temporary cardiac pacemaker. For this procedure X-Ray screening equipment is required to guide the pacing wire into the heart. This taste of interventional radiology was a portent of things to come.

Before my detour into psychiatry, I sat the physician’s exam known as ‘membership’. We had some tutorials from a locum radiologist. He was getting divorced and had left an academic post down south to work briefly as a locum in Dunfermline. His plain film sessions were a revelation and the unexpected depth and complexity of the specialty were revealed to me. He also showed us his pet films, those bizarre, funny or fascinating ones that aren’t strictly exam material; what I would later call, ‘Barnum and Bailey Radiology’.

I was intrigued. I realised that in the past I had been reliant on the written radiology report without appreciating the skill involved in generating that report. It’s easy to say, ‘Ah, yes,’ when the answer is right in front of you. Later, as a qualified radiologist, I would tell my juniors that the only skills a clinician needed to use a radiology department were reading and writing. Write a request, then read the report.

That kind of inter-specialty badinage was a long way down the line for the four of us who started our training together in 1984. All of us had left advanced registrar posts in general medicine where we had been given a great deal of responsibility, but I was the only one who had swerved into a career cul-de-sac. One of my co-appointees claimed to have heard the committee discussing my chequered CV before she was called in for her interview. As intended, it unsettled me until I heard that I had in fact been successful.

Essentially all four of us had been ‘busted back to private’ in another first-day-at-school experience to add to all the rest a medical career hands out. Worse, we had no radiology skills to offer in our first year, and could not do on-call. This meant we lost the substantial on-call supplement to our salaries. And then there were those exams to sit. These proved much more challenging than we expected. Virtually every specialty has its own distinct radiology associated with it and you needed to have an understanding of how imaging fitted into all those disciplines. We were embarking on a vast game of Radiological Trivial Pursuits. Piles of textbooks awaited us.

Unlike my new trainee colleagues who had come directly from medical specialties I did not miss the lack of beds, wards or status, but my knowledge of the human body had decayed since my days in the anatomy lecture theatre. A trick played on new recruits by our seniors was to ask them to name the eight bones of the carpus (wrist). Simple stuff for a second year medical student learning anatomy but tricky for the five-year postgraduate veteran. This was a ploy by our consultants to sober us up on arrival. We needed to grasp that the terra incognita was vast.

In an echo of first year at medical school we had to learn some Physics to give us an inkling of the science behind the big machines we would be using. We also attended an X-ray photography course run by the big supplier, Kodak. X-ray films are essentially photographs. Two days a week we were full-time postgraduate students. We had matriculation cards and everything. We could use the postgraduate union on Buccleugh Place and bunk off for a swim or a drink if a lecture was cancelled. The other three days of the week we tried to acquire the practicalities, the praxis, of our new trade. After the misery and confusion of my year in psychological medicine it was liberating.

Once, during a wild gale, we were making our way to the postgrad union for lunch. As we were walking along Middle Meadow Walk, which lies between the old Royal Infirmary and the Medical School, a tree blew down. It fell between the leading pair in our group and the other two (which included me) who following on behind. With a noise like gunshot and it crashed onto the path between us seconds after the leading pair had passed it. It is the only time I’ve ever witnessed a tree fall naturally. The chances of being killed by a falling tree are around one in 10 million per year.

Later that same year I was goaded into being interviewed for a feminist programme on Channel Four called Watch The Woman. My girlfriend at the time knew the producer from university. The programme was to be about women in medicine. At first I refused – and was mocked for being a coward. Stung, I finally agreed. The producer decided to interview me on Middle Meadow Walk.

A friendly preliminary chat with the interviewer and crew in a café on Forrest Road suggested they regarded me as a thoroughly decent chap. They even expressed surprise and sympathy to learn that I earned less than they did. The weather was fair and we went out onto Middle Meadow Walk to film the interview. This took place on a bench as pedestrians wandered past. It was my TV debut. One of the crew held up a board covered in foil to reflect the sun onto the shaded side of my face. On the sunny side the baleful black eye of the camera lens stared back at me.

Unlike the gentle enquiries lobbed at me over coffee, I was hit with a barrage of challenging questions regarding how much of an evil misogynist I was. The line was essentially, ‘Have you stopped being a sexist?’ to which any answer would be incriminating. One actual question was, ‘Do you feel threatened by nurses taking over doctors’ roles?’ The lens scrutinised me, the sun reflected off the board into my eyes. I gibbered inanely. ‘Do you resent nurses having prescribing rights?’ asked my tormentor.

Suddenly a voice said, ‘Well, I think we’ve got enough. We’ll do the noddies now.’ I felt like saying, ‘Wait! I haven’t said a word of sense!’ – but it was too late. You need the ‘noddies’ when you only have one video camera. The interviewer remained seated on the bench, while I had to watch from behind the cameraman. The interviewer repeated the questions he had already asked me to an empty seat and ‘nodded’ as if listening to my replies. Later they would splice this footage into my original responses as if there had been two cameras, one on me and the other on my persecutor. I wished I could go again. From then on I had a lot more respect for people such as politicians who answer combative questions in a live interview.

An agonising few months elapsed as I waited to view the finished programme. My girlfriend found this very entertaining. On the fateful night I couldn’t watch. As an alternative to hiding behind the sofa, I sat on the stairs and watched the recording later. In the event they used the only bit of sense I’d come out with, but it was a narrow escape. I didn’t keep the recording.

Plain radiographs – what everyone understands by the term ‘X-ray’ – were the basis of our new calling. These images depend on the natural intrinsic density of human tissues to X-ray photons and because bones are made mainly of calcium, a high atomic weight element, they show up well against the muscles, fat and gas of the rest of the body. We learned to injected iodine-based intravenous contrast media to create an artificial ‘contrast’ between structures containing these iodine compounds and their surroundings. Contrast is rapidly excreted by the kidneys so the renal tracts show up well. Injecting contrast directly into foot veins outlines any clots in the veins of the the calf and above.

For the gastrointestinal tract we were taught to perform barium studies. Barium sulphate is an inert, extremely heavy compound. ‘Barium’ actually means ‘heavy element’ and it stops X-ray photons in their tracks. You cannot inject it but you can swallow it and it will pass harmlessly through your gut without being absorbed. You can also put it up the other end of the gut as an enema. If you add air or any other gas an exquisite see-through image of the gut known as a ‘double-contrast’ study can be created. I used to liken this to an empty milk bottle with the milk still coating the surface of the glass.

Not all radiography is static. In fluoroscopic screening rooms the tilting examination ‘table’ has an X-ray source beneath it linked to a sensing ‘explorator’ above which can be moved over the patient to follow the progress of the ingested contrast. By pulling a trigger on the explorator, X-rays pass through the patient from beneath the table to strike a fluorescent plate inside the explorator. The image is then intensified electronically and transmitted to a nearby TV monitor. A live, moving radiographic image is seen. This equipment is necessary for dynamic barium studies.

A double contrast barium meal as it appears on an image intensifier showing the oesophagus, stomach and duodenal loop coated with barium and filled with gas from effervescent powder. The barium looks black indicating that no photons have reached the plate to make it glow. If you wish, you can reverse this image to make the barium look white as it would do on a conventional X-Ray film. The photons that pass through the patient cause blackening of the film while the lack of photons penetrating the barium leaves those parts of the film unexposed and white.

The ritual of these examinations is still embedded in my brain:

‘Turn to your left. Take the cup in your left hand; it’s heavy. Swallow one mouthful for me now please. Now drink the rest as quickly as you can… I’m going to tilt the table down flat… Stay on your left side. Now turn onto your stomach. I’m going to give you a shake; there’s no extra charge for this…’

In the ancient photograph below the operator is using direct screening. The X-ray source is behind the patient and the image is produced as the x-rays strike the plate in front of the patient’s abdomen – the operator is in direct line-of-fire. Because the image produced was so faint radiologists had to ‘dark-adapt’ and use their more sensitive night vision. To dark-adapt in advance of a screening list radiologists would don red goggles for 20 minutes. Very little light penetrated these goggles and there were alarming tales of radiologists driving between hospitals while wearing goggles to avoid dark-adapting all over again at their destination.

Direct screening in the good old days – and Konrad Roentgen

Our lecturers scared us with tales of the ‘X-Ray Martyrs’ who did not understand the lethal properties of the new miracle rays they were employing. They used their own hands to calibrate the equipment every day – until the bones disintegrated and tumours appeared.

Barium studies have been more or less completely replaced by endoscopy and cross-sectional imaging techniques such as CT and MR. The ability to visualise and biopsy the gut clearly trumps barium, but it took a while for the endoscopists to acquire the resources to deal with the demand. Radiologists who spent their whole careers performing barium examinations and writing great textbooks about it became part of medical history during my working lifetime. Towards the end of my career the occasional request for a barium study in a patient who had declined endoscopy caused panic among our juniors who had no idea how to perform one.

The same fate befell lymphography, a fiendishly difficult technique requiring cannulation of tiny lymphatic ducts in the feet. You injected a blue dye (mixed with local anaesthetic) between toes and, after a while, the dye found its way into the lymphatic ducts which would hopefully show up as faint blue lines under the skin on the top of the feet. You then ‘cut down’ onto them, dissected them out, and inserted a tiny needle into them to inject oily contrast. You hoped you hadn’t found a vein instead. A check X-ray was required to see where the contrast was going. If it was floating around in tiny globules, instead of thread-like ducts, you’d mucked it up.

By the next day the lymphatic contrast would have reached the lymph nodes of the abdomen. Two offset radiographs were taken then placed together on a viewing box. By viewing the films using binocular apparatus a 3-D image of the nodes was produced. You then inspected the nodes for any defects that might represent tumour deposits. This technique was completely replaced by CT. These changes in practice brought no savings to radiology budgets as the growth of ultrasound, CT, MR and interventional radiology meant a struggle to re-equip and re-skill our own departments.

Apart from lymphography all the examinations described above result in two-dimensional images. The bones, soft tissues and any contrast material are projected together in a jumble onto a flat film. You need to know the three-dimensional anatomy that underlies the image in order to interpret this confusion. Almost invariably in TV dramas chest X-rays are placed the wrong way round on viewing boxes – to the extent that it seemed deliberate to me. I wondered if the props department knew that the heart should be on the left and so put the chest X-ray up that way not realising the heart is not on their left but on the patient’s left. A radiologist looks at a radiograph as if they were looking at the patient’s body from in front. The crucial skill to acquire early on is knowing the patient’s left from their right – otherwise disaster can ensue. Similarly, in cross-sectional imaging, by convention, the body is viewed from below, as if looking up at the organs from the feet. Here again, the organs of the right side of the body lie to the left of the image.

A radiologist of my vintage would be subjected to a dose of radiation amounting to roughly twice the background dose we all get in our normal lives. (People in Cornwall and Aberdeen get more because of the radioactive rocks in these places.) This is actually a minimal increase in risk as we all have about a 40% chance of developing cancer anyway. Nevertheless we all wore film badges on our belts that monitored our dose and got togged up in heavy lead aprons to do screening lists.

In a hideously incorrect joke lead aprons were sometimes referred to as ‘Irish lifejackets’ when I started.

I am old enough to remember shoe shops with X-Ray screening equipment that allowed you and your mother to view your toes wiggling away inside your new Start-Rites. I’ve seen my own toes several times this way. When I showed an image of this equipment during a lecture towards the end of my career it produced a gasp of horror from the young audience.

Radiotherapy for kids’ feet in the 50s and 60s

Before the advent of ‘dry’ processing using film cassettes, X-ray films were developed in fluid-filled tanks in a darkroom. These ‘films’ were originally glass photographic plates. When I started radiology request cards at the Royal Infirmary were still being stamped ‘WPP’ standing for ‘Wet Plate Please’ even though we had on long since moved to dry films. A ‘wet plate’ meant an urgent examination that was to be returned to the ward or clinic with the patient. If you were on the rota for ‘top bench,’ reporting films as they came through, wet plates were prioritised. The reports were typed by a secretary who sat beside you at ‘top bench’ transcribing your immortal prose. A carbon copy was kept on the back of the original request card and the top copy sent back to the ward with the films. The cards were filed manually in the department.

Films regularly went missing. Comparison with any previous films a patient might have had is invaluable for interpretation. The clinicians involved thought that they should keep the films – either in their ward or in the boot of their car. We thought they should be filed systematically in our department and so be available for comparison. Finding films, a running sore for everyone involved, was eventually fixed by the arrival of digital storage.

Paradoxically, plain films, while a simple technique, are very tricky to report. You require a vast mental archive of normal and abnormal appearances in order to interpret what you are seeing. There are two kinds of error in reporting an examination. You can either fail to see the abnormality or misinterpret that abnormality and issue a misleading report. There are sins of omission and commission. For a long time we junior trainees required to have our work checked by our elders and betters, a senior registrar or a consultant if you could find one.

Like the fieldcraft of birdwatching, it is not enough to look at something, you have to understand what it is. The whole problem with birds is to make an identification. Is it something common or rare? – to see what is different in each species. Likewise in radiology you need experience to recognise what you are looking at. You require a a mental library of all the variations in normal appearances. In radiology there are textbooks of ‘normal variants’ that have to be learned (Keats). To the tyro the ability of the experienced radiologist to recognise pathology instantly – like an old friend – seems almost mystical.

Before digital imaging radiology departments kept hard-copy film libraries where interesting cases were stored for teaching. Pilfering for somebody’s private teaching collection or borrowing by clinicians who ‘forgot’ to bring the films back was a constant threat to the collection. Periodically some hapless junior would be given the task of sorting out the entropic chaos of these places. The keen ones enjoyed doing it and benefitted from it. When I did my trawl through the archive at the Western I found some ancient films in disintegrating bags. One of them showed an elderly man’s forearm with a fracture. In addition, there was a metallic foreign body in the soft tissues close to the elbow. I turned the bag over to see why this had been kept. In pencil in beautiful copperplate script someone had written:

Gunshot injury. Shot by Robert Louis Stevenson!

There was no other information.

Anatomy

‘The child is father of the man,’ said Wordsworth in My Heart Leaps Up. Once, when I was very young, my grandmother complained of feeling unwell and I apparently said, ‘You can tell me about it Granny, I know all about anatomy.’ A certain amount of self-confidence is helpful in a medical career.

Brought up on a farm, I became interested in the structure of living things. At first I drew animals, then later, the human body. At the Highland Show I discovered a book on avian biology. I shot and dissected birds to see what was inside them and tried to match my findings to the diagrams in the book. I also tried to identify the internal organs of fish when I gutted them. Like a teenage haruspex, I read entrails and pondered my future. It was all a bit Jeffrey Dahmer, according to my daughter.

The ‘large practice’ veterinary surgeon who attended our farm was impressive. He had a silver Mk2 Jaguar with in-car radio communications when that sort of thing was practically unheard of. The boot of his car was crammed with interesting equipment and drugs. Our head byre-man, Richard, was a fan. He was of the opinion that doctors could simply ‘bury’ their mistakes, but the loss of a valuable pedigree animal was a much more serious – and conspicuous – matter. At that age I missed his implication that the relationship between an NHS doctor and his patient was subtly different from that of a costly veterinary surgeon and his client. Richard told me our vet knew more about cattle than the local GP did about people, and I believed him.

In the small ‘office’ at the head of the byre was a cupboard containing some rudimentary veterinary equipment for the stockman and DIY vet. There was a vicious-looking trocar and cannula for stabbing cattle suffering from ‘bloat.’ This is a a life-threatening condition caused by a gas-distended stomach. Having entered the stomach through the cow’s flank, the trocar was removed allowing the gas to escape through the cannula. I never saw it used in anger.

There were large bottles of magnesium solution which were administered to cows with ‘grass staggers’. You gave the fluid through a long rubber tube via a fearsome large-bore needle. The subcutaneous infusion created a blister under the skin that had to be massaged to make it disperse. I was intrigued that you could intervene in a crisis and restore equilibrium.

Sometimes I got to observe the vet at work. I saw him use a metal detector to confirm that a cow had swallowed a foreign body. It turned out to be a piece of barbed wire. He fished about inside the animal and removed it. I saw him correct a ‘twisted stomach,’ more properly called a volvulus. This is when part of the gut rotates around its point of origin, cutting off the blood supply to the affected segment. In due course, if untreated, the piece of gut dies and so does the animal. Surprisingly, the cow remained upright in a loose box throughout the whole procedure. The vet injected local anaesthetic on each side of the cow’s spine then cut two large incisions below the pin bones, part of the pelvis. There was partial paralysis of the back legs and it was my job, along with Richard the byre-man, to keep the cow upright.

Normally, a cow’s hide closely follows the contours of its bones and soft tissues, but cutting into the abdominal cavity results in the skin pulling tight between adjacent bony prominences. Air is then sucked into the abdominal cavity. It was a cold winter day and as the cow breathed, clouds of condensation puffed out of the incisions and blood trickled down her flanks.

The vet worked from both sides, successfully untwisting the stomach. He then anchored it in place with stitches and sewed up the layers of peritoneum, muscle and hide in turn. The cow survived and the whole procedure made a big impression on me. However, I had my eye on an urban job and never seriously considered applying for vet school. My mother’s relentless campaigning had steered me away from other careers and I was duly accepted to study medicine at Edinburgh. I calculated that if I didn’t like it, I could always drop out and do something else with less demanding entry requirements.

The magnificent purpose-built Italianate Medical School of Edinburgh University (1880) was meticulously designed by Sir Robert Rowand Anderson after an extensive European fact-finding tour. The building abuts the McEwan Graduation Hall. It encloses a large central quadrangle called the New Quad and is accessed by archways. It features lanterns on cast-iron supports. My eventual graduation photo, seven years later, was taken in that courtyard.

In the eastern corner (just to the right of the photograph below) is an archway that led to Bristo Square and the Teviot Row Student Union. Next to that archway was the door to the Medical Faculty Office or ‘Fac Off’ as the students referred to it. The Fac Off was on the ground floor. The Anatomy Department was upstairs.

June 1979: I’m in the second back row, beneath the window to the left of the doorway. On my left is Richie Edwards who also became a radiologist.

https://www.filmedinburgh.org/Locations/The-Medical-School-University-of-Edinburgh-858/Medical-School-Quad-Buildings

With the benefit of decent English A-Levels you might be allowed to enter directly into second year at Edinburgh, but with Scottish Highers you had to complete the full six-year course. First year was all basic sciences: physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, biology and labs so during Freshers Week, to make us feel more medical, we were given a rudimentary course in first aid. People would expect us to know something about res medica from now on.

In small groups we had tours of the medical school conducted by a fourth-year student. The one who took us was short with curly red hair and sideburns. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and grey flannel trousers. He looked like someone’s grandad. He took us to view the legendary Anatomy Lecture Theatre, modelled on the one in Padua where Vesalius had taught. In Second Year we would have 9 a.m. lectures there every day, perched on the precipitous banks of seats. Side stairs emerged half way up the auditorium seating allowing latecomers to slip in. One day, I would give my last lecture in that theatre.

We were taken to see the Anatomy Museum, with its two elephant skeletons flanking the entrance and were shown the copy of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp which hung on the wall nearby. Finally, we were conducted up more stairs to the dissection room. The pungent fumes of formalin became more intrusive as we ascended. In the stairwell hung posters illustrating great moments in medicine, including a painting of Charcot teaching at the Salpêtrière.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clinical_Lesson_at_the_Salpêtrière

For obvious reasons the dissection room had no outward-facing windows but it was brightly lit from above by a glazed sawtooth steel roof. Down either side of this very large room were rows of trolleys bearing objects draped in grey tarpaulins. Our tweedy guide was approaching the climax of his performance. ‘And these,’ he announced, ‘Are the bodies!’ With that, he threw back the nearest drape to reveal two sickeningly white feet inside a thick polythene bag with a puddle of formalin gathered under the heels. The girl next to me promptly fainted and our tour turned into a practical.

In Second Year, boring basic sciences completed, we finally made it back to the Anatomy Department. I liked studying anatomy. After all, as Pope said, ‘The proper study of mankind is man.’ Six of us were allocated to each body, three to a side. As with all our practicals we were sorted alphabetically. I got to know fellow students, Stewart and Sternberg.

We bought our Cunningham’s Dissection Manuals from Donald Ferrier’s Medical Book Shop in Teviot Place and watched, fascinated, as they were expertly covered in the trademark green paper and white labels. At the 9 a.m. lectures our teachers attempted to emulate the great D J Cunningham by building up chalk drawings of bone, muscle, nerves and blood vessels on the blackboards. Anatomical posters hung on the walls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_John_Cunningham

Upstairs we dissected the morning away, while consulting the relevant sections of our manuals: upper and lower limb; thorax; abdominal cavity; head and neck. Afterwards we walked under the archway in the quad and through the gates next to the McEwan Hall to the Teviot Row Union for lunch. Human grease spots marked the green covers of our manuals. We discussed our progress over haggis and chips and a yoghurt. For no extra charge you could enjoy waitress service (of the same refectory menu) upstairs in the dining room. Many of our lecturers ate there too. There was a bronze bust of Churchill in an alcove at one end. After lunch it was essential to have a refreshment in the ‘upstairs bar’. Each bar in the Union had its distinctive clientele. I liked the old-fashioned smoky atmosphere in the upstairs bar, which featured a piano. Playing that instrument brought chances to meet students from other faculties, especially musicians.

In the end I did seven years at university because I had to repeat third year. Throughout my first attempt at year three, I rose at midday, had breakfast in a local café, then went to a snooker club in Morningside my flatmate and I had joined. For two terms, I essentially did nothing but sleep and play snooker. In March I celebrated my 21st birthday. At the end of the three term academic year I had no notes to read, having attended just three lectures in total. The other students needed their notes for themselves and in any case, lecture notes are very individual things. What gets recorded – and whether anyone else can read it – is unpredictable. It was too late for me to read the bulky textbooks that covered the course and so I ended up with resits.

During that summer of studious penitence my father became gravely ill with pancreatitis. He collapsed at the Ayr market while buying cattle. He ran a large family business and when he became ill our lives were plunged into chaos. After several weeks in hospital, he died, just before my exams. With his high profile in Scottish agriculture, a big funeral followed. As eldest son, I took cord number one at the graveside. Three days later I had my resits, exactly a week after Dad died.

I managed to pass those subjects I’d already studied; the more appealing Pathological Sciences. I completely ploughed Physiological Sciences which I hadn’t even touched. Under the circumstances, I was allowed to repeat my third year doing only those subjects I’d failed. This gave me time to play a lot more snooker and meet a new set of interesting classmates in my new year group.

As a postgraduate I finally picked up my game, became a medical registrar and passed the examination for membership of the Royal College of Physcians (MRCP). This is the main qualification for a career in general medicine. At that time, to progress further, you also needed to study for an MD or PhD and preferably get a ‘BTA’ (Been To America). Even when extensively post-nominalled, you had little control over where your Senior Registrar post might be. If I really wanted to stay in my adopted city I needed to change lanes into another specialty. Since schooldays, I had toyed with a career in Psychiatry. This was because I imagined it might combine science and the arts. One of my consultants in general medicine advised me against it. ‘I don’t know exactly what the future holds, Allan, but it will involve those big new machines in radiology. I think that would suit you.’ Not ready for a specialty that didn’t ‘hold beds’, I ignored him.

During the interview for entry to the Edinburgh training scheme in Psychiatry I was asked if any of my family were medical. I said no. They then asked what had first attracted me to Psychiatry. I answered, truthfully, that I had been fascinated by the portrayal of psychiatrists in films and television as brilliant insightful analysts of the human condition. Emboldened, I mentioned Gregory Peck in Spellbound. This seemed to go down well, and I was in.

In spite of my theory about it combining the arts and sciences, I was unhappy from day one. There were two rival psychiatric camps in the 1980s. I was immediately identified as an alien by those of my contemporaries who had entered the specialty solely to conduct psychotherapy. To compound my sins, my car was bad. ‘When we saw your car we thought, “Here comes the medical model,” ‘ one of them remarked. I hadn’t bargained for all this political infighting. I told friends that if you wished someone ‘good morning’ at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, you would be asked what you meant by it.

My new boss, the professor of psychiatry, had once been a neurologist. He would later become Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Edinburgh and President of the Royal College of Psychiatry. Unlike the psychotherapy gang, he was keen to have an MRCP on the books. The topic of his inaugural address was whether or not you needed to be a doctor to practise psychiatry. He felt that if you were dealing with the major psychoses or the degenerative brain diseases and were administering powerful drugs, you did need to be a doctor. Otherwise, not so much.

As the year wore on, I found myself swamped by outpatients, some of whom threatened suicide when I hinted they might be well enough for discharge (which they were). When I asked for advice about this mess I was told I was ‘encouraging dependency’. Despite these problems the trainees were left almost completely unsupervised by the senior staff. I became increasingly annoyed and disillusioned by it.

On call, we first year trainees, only a few weeks into the job, were told to offer short term psychotherapy to patients, some of whose notes were so thick they had clearly seen every consultant psychiatrist in Edinburgh. In a lecture on psychotherapy, given by another illustrious professor, I questioned the value of this to our patients or us as trainees. He told me, ‘If you said that to me in an examination I would fail you and trust you would take up some other branch of medicine.’ This seemed to be a clear indication of how I should proceed. The following week a consultant from my own ward took me aside and told me that what this professor had said to me in the lecture would have no influence on my future career. I resolved that it wouldn’t. I was miserable and it was contaminating my private life.

Having turned into this blind alley, I had to escape. In the end I stuck it out for a full academic year but half way through, when the radiology posts were advertised after Christmas, I applied. My ex-neurologist prof, who liked me, called me over to his office in the ivory tower to explain myself. He placed me in a low armchair then perched on his desk, looming over me. He opened with, ‘Why are you leaving?’ I answered truthfully that I’d found no satisfaction in the job. I felt that the patients got better or worse unconnected with anything I did for them. ‘What interests you in medicine?’ he asked. I found myself saying I liked structure and function. He smiled, ‘We could be 100 years away from that in psychiatry.’ He then ended the interview amicably and told me to let him know how I got on.

Towards the end of those 12 months I gave a talk to the hospital grand rounds on the madness of George III. Sitting at the back of the lecture theatre, and bored during someone else’s talk, I started reading the profusion of graffiti inscribed into the wooden desktops. There were lots of initials and dates. Rashly, I wrote ‘PSYCHIATRY IS BUNK – AJMS 1983-84.’

The radiology interviews were tricky. I now seemed to be someone who had no idea where his career was going, and worse, had even been a psychiatrist. It seemed I would be a unique specimen within radiology. A rival colleague waiting for her interview claimed to have heard them discussing me in predictably negative terms. Despite this, they appointed me, but it was a strong field and I was the oldest and least qualified of the four of us. The others all had MRCP and published research.

When I announced my radiology appointment to my psychiatrist chums there was a degree of ill-disguised animus. I was told, ‘Radiologists are like mushrooms. You keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.’ Another said, ‘When we looked at X-Ray reports, one of my old consultants used to say, “Don’t read that laddie, it wasn’t written by a real doctor.” ‘ Top humour, all of it.

Perhaps because it did indeed suit me or maybe because I was finally escaping from psychiatry, I loved radiology from the outset. It was a return to the study of the undisputed structural aspects of humankind; the plumbing and wiring. It was also an enjoyable intellectual challenge to absorb all that information and develop new diagnostic skills. Feeling very positive about life, and mindful of what he had said, I wrote to my old psychiatry professor, the future Dean of the Faculty of Medicine. , telling him I was happy and thanking him for his advice.

He wrote back:

Dear Allan

I do hope you settle down in your chosen speciality soon. Should you have any doubts about your decision, I suggest you recall what you inscribed on one of our lecture theatre desks not more than six months ago: ‘PSYCHIATRY IS BUNK – AJMS 1983-84.’ I trust this was an accurate reflection of your feelings at the time.

Yours,

REK

All things must pass and the old medical school is now the home of the History Department and other Edinburgh University odds and ends. Clearly it was no longer ‘fit for purpose’ but I count it a great privilege to have attended lectures in the quad, then crossed Middle Meadow Walk to the wards of the Royal Infirmary. This experience is no longer available to Edinburgh medics. The wonderful building that was the Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place, is now undergoing a seemingly endless conversion to apartments, offices and restaurants. The famed surgical corridor with its checkerboard floor of ‘plantation rubber’, its marble busts and the names of donors in gold lettering on the walls, is to become the new Edinburgh University Business School.

Philabegs

From the outset we were dressed in kilts at every opportunity. This didn’t much bother us, being junior patriots; except when it came to parties. It was not cool to attend those in highland dress. You can’t do a convincing Twist or Shake when you look like a miniature Andy Stewart. My parents once sent me to a children’s party at a farm south of Dunure on the Ayrshire coast dressed as illustrated above. At age nine, I was the youngest guest and the only one in a kilt. Complicated party games ensued that I didn’t really understand. The Beatles had just released I Want to Hold Your Hand. One of the older boys kept sneaking over to the record player to put it on. Relief washed over me when my parents eventually arrived to take me home. My mother was irritated, ‘You needn’t have looked so pleased to see us!’ she said, once we were in the car.

Our first kilts were hand-me-downs from our older girl cousins and had secret white sleeveless bodices sewn onto them. This was useful for keeping the lower edge of ones kilt at knee-level – but a bit warm. The tartan (or sett) was Ancient Murray of Atholl because my paternal grandmother was a Murray. Our family surnames were otherwise all Lowland Scots: Stevenson, Walker, Meikle and Black. These days there’s a tartan for every name or institution.

I suppose we all bought into the Victorian fantasy of the clans. In reality, tartans were originally just the type of woollen cloth woven in a given area before the ‘tartaning’ of Scotland really got going. Most plaids were a simple grey colour. In A Man’s a Man For a’ That (1795) Burns refers to ‘hodden grey’, that being the simplest, cheapest, type of cloth woven from a mixture of black and white wool. White predominated in the proportion 12:1.

Underneath our kilts we wore what Mum referred to as ‘trews’ – which were sort of underpants made of dark green wool and not at all like the trews I would later wear with black tie.

My mother considered kilts mandatory for all family and social occasions and I suppose we did look quite presentable. As my father was a director of the Royal Highland Society there was a three-line whip for kilts at the Highland Show. This was held in June at the Ingliston show ground west of Edinburgh. For the duration of hostilities we stayed with my grandparents at Eskbank. Dad, favoured a light tweed suit – I never saw him in highland dress. With his fancy director’s badge pinned to the left lapel like a medal, he would set off very early in the morning, a big D (for Director) Car Park Sticker attached to the windscreen of the Jaguar. We would follow on later with Mum, Granny and Grandad.

Despite Edinburgh being on the east coast of Scotland, the show ground could be warm in June and the thick wool kilts coupled with Pringle jumpers and tweed jackets were stifling. If you were with the womenfolk you were doomed to meet their friends and your more obscure relatives every few strides. It was never very clear to me who these people were. We were repeatedly greeted with, ‘These must be the boys!’ then asked our names, our age, and what we were doing at school. We were told how nice we looked in our kilts.

As the eldest, I soon learned to escape this social quicksand by going off with my grandfather. He had been a breeder of Shorthorn cattle and Clydesdale horses and together we would inspect the stock lines and watch the judging in the ring. Grandad, in a grey suit with heavy brogue shoes soled in leather and armoured with metal segs, leaned on his stick and scrutinised the animals from under his bonnet without a word. When he did meet old farming friends, their exchanges were laconic to a fault. It was infinitely preferable to meeting the mystery relatives.

In those days, many farmers at the show carried a stick, often a shepherd’s crook with a carved horn handle. My dad had a rather exotic-looking light cane number which he mostly carried hooked over his left arm. Many of the women sported leather shooting sticks for sitting on during long conversations. For the rest of the year these implements languished in the hall cupboard.

Plaide is gaelic for blanket and feileadh means wrap. The feileadh-mor or great kilt was a huge length of wool cloth that was gathered roughly into pleats and laid on the ground on top of a large leather belt. The wearer then lay down on the cloth and wrapped it around himself, securing the garment with the belt and covering his upper body with the remaining length of plaid. In the early 19th century the modern tailored short kilt, the feileadh beag (little wrap) was developed. The term was anglicised to philabeg or filibeg. This style of garment became the kilt worn by Scottish regiments.

My kilt-wearing stopped when I went to secondary school. Philabegs were by then deeply unfashionable and expensive to replace as we outgrew them. In any case, we no longer wished to wear the kilt. Later, at Edinburgh University in the seventies, commando jackets and patched flared jeans with desert or cowboy boots were de rigueur. An Afghan coat was the ultimate in fashion if you could afford one. My cowboy boots were bought in Greyfriars Market in Forrest Road and, incongruously, made in Czechoslovakia. They were perfect for long strenuous events, like attending the Tron Kirk on New Year’s Eve. The heels raised you that bit higher to help you keep track of your pals in the vast crowd, and you could crunch over the broken glass around the Heart of Midlothian with impunity.

Lacking any sort of smart clothes during this era, my mother had me measured for a three-piece pinstripe suit at a local gentleman’s outfitters. I insisted on huge lapels, a tight waistcoat and flared trousers with big turn-ups. The latter brushed the ground even when worn with my thick platform-soled ankle boots with their bulbous toes. I only ever remember wearing that suit for family funerals. When I went to my first medics’ ball I had to hire a dinner jacket and was very disappointed with the rather cheap material and unfashionable cut.

In the Eighties and Nineties we all smartened up. This was the era of Wall Street and Gordon Gekko. I had already cut my long hair and shaved off the beard although I kept the moustache for a while. I bought suits, coats and leather jackets, which all had big padded shoulders. I wore braces with my trousers and sported black lacing shoes with leather soles. A Russian friend had given me some advice; ‘All suits, shirts and ties are basically the same. The only thing a man should spend his money on is his watch and his shoes.’ For formal wear I bought a very nice Italian-made dinner jacket out of Austin Reed. It was double-breasted with sensible lapels and fitted me perfectly. Highland dress could not have been further from my mind.

No one of my age foresaw the resurgence of Scottish national dress that followed. Suddenly weddings, balls and rugby matches went full tartan. Until then, for formal occasions, I had worn my dinner jacket – but now I perceived I had a wardrobe gap, and took myself off to Kinloch Anderson for a fitting.

Pre-march: rugby strip, plain leather sporran, big belt and walking boots

KA didn’t get those Royal Warrants for undercharging, but it was reassuring – as I contemplated such a large investment – to be expertly dealt with. I was measured for a kilt and a pair of proper trews. For the sett, I opted for Modern Murray of Atholl because it was darker and more formal-looking than the washed-out tartan of my childhood.

Naturally, I needed a ‘coatee and vest’ for evenings and a tweed Jacket and waistcoat for day-wear. Then I had to choose two sporrans; a leather one for daytime and a furry one with a silver ‘cantle’ for formal occasions. I also had to have special socks and a skian dhu to tuck down one of them. I needed a big belt with a big buckle for ceilidhs, when you would wear just a shirt – and then there was the vexing question of what design of kilt pin to get. On and on it went. At least I already owned dress shirts, a black bow tie, cufflinks and dress studs. I also had a pair of decent black brogues and thus managed to sidestep getting the peculiar ghillie variety with all the holes and those long laces.

Initially I was very pleased with my new rig-out and wore it on the flimsiest of excuses – not just Burns Night. I have to say that my friends, some of whom had not fully emerged from the hippie years, did not share my enthusiasm. In fact, one or two considered it very FUNNY.

Soon after my spending spree at Kinloch Anderson, a trip to Rome for the Six Nations was mooted by some younger colleagues. Unlike me, these boys were well-used to wearing the kilt and did so at every opportunity. The four days of that visit were the longest continuous time I’ve dressed in a kilt. Having left home without any trousers there was no alternative. Our outfits gave us an undeserved celebrity in the Eternal City and I lost count of how often out hosts asked for photographs.

Posing like a fish supper in the Pantheon d’Agrippa

Most of the time I wore the kilt for formal occasions rather than sporting events, but my enthusiasm for the philibeg had decayed. I had already substituted trews with Chelsea boots for those occasions when I would once have worn a dinner jacket. In any case, to my great regret, the moths had eaten my DJ. Trews are more comfortable and practical than a kilt, and I was told that officers and gentlemen wore trews because they had horses to ride. Kilts were for the foot soldiers and the ghillies.

Trews with their military connotations are not favoured by the more vehement supporters of Scottish Independence – another good reason to wear them. The bitter division of Scots into pro- and anti-independence camps over this issue has been disturbing and has created an unpleasant atmosphere somewhat akin to the Jacobite Rebellion. At social occasions the topic is taboo if you are unaware of a person’s affiliation – and also frequently when you are. This loss of national unity in Scotland is regrettable and shows no signs of abating. The whole thing has put me off wearing the kilt. To some, that makes me the wrong sort of Scotsman.

The wearing of kilts by just about every male attending a Scottish wedding continues. Recently my son married a girl from Cornwall. I took him to Kinloch Anderson to get him measured for his and all the Scots men wore kilts on the day. Shortly after that, a Scottish friend’s daughter married a boy from Birmingham and all the English lads hired kilts for the day. All things must pass and perhaps the obsession with national identity will recede and we will return to some sort of international outlook on life. In the meantime we seem doomed to an endless spiral of division into smaller and smaller-minded groups.

At school I spoke broad Ayrshire dialect, totally at odds with how we spoke at home, but one did not want to stand out from the crowd. There are movements to elevate these dialects to create some kind of linguistic chimera, despite Scots English having fragmented into disparate regional dialects hundreds of years ago. A lingua artificialis perhaps to go with the Gaelic signage sprouting up over lowland Scotland. Who knows, it may soon be necessary to speak Scots and wear lowland Scottish dress to identify with your true heritage. Get out your hodden grey plaidies boys…

Drawing

I was obsessed with drawing from an early age, especially horses. Out of the blue at a primary school medical, the district nurse said, ‘I hear you can draw a horse in three lines. Show me.’ At that she pushed a sheet of paper and a pencil across the desk. The three lines thing bothered me. You can’t draw a horse in three lines. I did my best then pushed the paper back to her.

Horses (not the drawing I gave to the nurse!)

My mother and grandmother conducted my upbringing. My father had almost nothing to do with it. The two matriarchs spent a lot of time worrying I would waste my life by taking up something inappropriate as a career – such as art or music. When you have ‘surgeon’s hands’ as my granny put it, you ought not to squander your gift playing the piano or doodling. ‘Very nice for a hobby dear, but not for a career,’ was a remark I heard frequently. Nevertheless a piano was bought and I was given art materials for birthdays and Christmases. I spent so much time playing the piano my mother would sometimes lock it.

*Animal Wonders* – an early publication, aged eight. Priced competitively at 2d.

Compared with drawing I found painting much more difficult, particularly with colour-blindness lurking in the background. At school I would ask the girl next to me to tell me which crayon was the green one and which brown; then I would carefully place them on opposite sides of the desk. I always preferred drawing to painting.

Before dropping art as a subject, I would sometimes get picked to take part in school art competitions. One of these was at the Kelvin Hall Museum in Glasgow. My mother packed the usual ham and egg sandwiches into a Tupperware box and off I went in the bus. I wandered around the museum looking for inspiration. I just couldn’t decide what to paint, and in the end I chose some stuffed mallards in a glass case. The result was appalling. I vividly recall my art teacher’s crestfallen expression as he asked me why on earth I’d picked that for a subject. I was ashamed of my ineptitude and began to think surgery sounded like the easier option.

Even after I’d escaped the clutches of the Art Department I kept drawing. I had an interest in the work of Velasquez and Rodin and tried copying various images from books. Many years later on holiday in New York we were on a tour of the Metropolitan Museum conducted by a friend, Eyal. An artist himself, he did tours regularly with art students and visitors. I recounted my past efforts to him and mentioned copying Velasquez’s portrait of his assistant, Juan de Pareja.

‘You do know that’s here?’ he asked. I did not. A bell rang; the museum was closing. ‘Come on, I know where it is,’ he said, grabbing my arm. We ran up a staircase. The guard at the top held up a hand and said, ‘Gentlemen, we are closing.’ ‘I know,’ said Eyal, ‘We just want to see one picture.’ Skidding round a corner into a big first floor gallery, we arrived in front of the painting. It was surprisingly small, but so beautiful. I was thrilled.

Juan de Pareja with my generous acknowledgement to Velasquez (forged his signature)

Later, at university I doodled during lectures – something I pursued compulsively for the rest of my career whenever I became bored in meetings or talks.

I occasionally drew illustrations for student magazines and toyed with cartooning.

Once qualified, I started my house officer jobs. I had experienced a very stressful student locum on a general surgical unit and (despite my hands) had no desire to become a surgeon. I took one of the less popular posts in orthopaedic surgery just to get that part of the preregistration year out of the way. I spent two months at the Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital, Fairmilehead. My responsibilities were confined to the wards that had been allocated to me and did not include other firms whose registrars were meant to clerk in their own patients. Despite this, one very well-spoken registrar tried to get me to admit the professor’s patients. I refused, whereupon he called me ‘a slimy rat’ and stalked off in the huff.

On call that night and bored, I decided to depict the ‘slimy rat’ that I had become. An Australian registrar looked at my drawing and asked if he could have it for a few minutes. It turned out he was not a fan of my antagonist. Unknown to me, he photocopied my drawing and pinned it up on various noticeboards throughout the hospital.

The next morning I was confused to encounter various paramedical staff expressing their sympathy for the awful thing that Mr Court-Brown had done to me. Once I spotted the copies of my masterpiece on the wall I realised that they assumed I had been the victim of a nasty prank. I felt a bit miffed that they thought CCB could have done the drawing. Irony is never easy to convey non-verbally.

Despite her iron grip on my future, my mother failed to stop me hanging about with artists and musicians. I even married an artist. My interest in birds encouraged me to return to drawing later in life and I started recording the more interesting ones I’d seen. I would draw them, cut them out, and fold back the base so I could stand them up on my bookshelves. I also took a small drawing book with me on holidays and birding trips.

Great Northern Diver, Bewick Swan, Hoopoe.

Juvenile Golden Eagle, Tree Sparrow, Buff-breasted Sandpiper.

At work and bored in meetings and lectures, I continued doodling. Birds in flight were my favourite subject. I really like watching gulls, birds that many people detest but which are masters of their element and endlessly graceful in form and movement. The complex structure of their wings from different angles is a delightful challenge.

Musical Theory

My dad had a huge collection of shellac 78 rpm records. He kept the classical ones away from us, but allowed us play the popular stuff. In retrospect this was a misjudgement. The pops were much more interesting than Arturo Toscanini, and we broke them. Nevertheless, we have many intact survivors from Dad’s collection stored in smart carrying cases. He must have bought new records every week. Having broken a 78, the only thing you could do was tape up the side you didn’t like and try listening to the other side through the horrible clicks – but basically nothing would fix a broken 78.

Incongruent Arturo enclosing The Birth Of The Blues. His daughter married Vladimir Horowitz.

Focal damage might produce the classic repetitive backward jump to the preceding groove, but this seems to be more a feature of scratched 33 rpm vinyl discs. I’m a bit surprised that the phrase ‘the needle’s stuck,’ referring to someone’s repetitive conversational traits, is still around today. Not for much longer, I suspect. ‘The CD’s jumping’ doesn’t have the same ring. CDs are disappearing anyway as vinyl makes a comeback – and digital sound files just randomly drop out leaving one of those buffering things going round and round.

I suppose ‘such phrases ‘the needle’s stuck’ is no different from other metaphors still in use that are based on long abandoned pastimes or occupations. Saying someone is ‘a loose cannon’ refers to naval battles where a gun, which should be an asset, breaks free of its moorings and rolls about the deck maiming your own men. Other phrases have drifted in meaning. Saying ‘the sun is over the yardarm’ has become an excuse for evening drinks. In fact, the Royal Navy dispensed the first tot of rum at noon – when the sun was at its zenith and over the yardarm. By the way, there really is a website called C.A.N.O.E. (Campaign to Ascribe a Nautical Origin to Everything). You can look it up.

Anyway, back to records. The needles for playing 78 records came in a little tin box. You fitted a new needle into the head of the armature when the old one got blunt and the sound quality became noticeably fuzzy. A metal pole in the middle of the turntable allowed you to stack up several records so that they dropped sequentially onto the velvet-covered platter below. I was never sure how that mechanism prevented the whole lot from dropping down at once. 78 rpm is quite fast, and as a new one dropped it would skid slightly on the one below.

The record player as a whole was actually a piece of varnished wooden furniture. The workings were accessed by pulling down a convex door in the top by its black bakelite handle. This brought the turntable out into position. Underneath this deck compartment were doors to cupboards for storing a few records. Later, Dad bought a teak Bang and Olufsen ‘stereogram’ with a Garrard deck and we were launched into the world of vinyl. The stereo LPs had a rainbow coloured ring around the label.

I really liked Jimmy Shand’s Scottish country dance numbers. As a very small child, after breaking Shand’s recording of Loch Lomond, I picked up the black phone that I knew connected the house automatically to the business’ office in town. Martha, the office manager, answered and I asked her to get me a new record. Amused, and wishing to stall, she asked me where she should get the money from for a new record. I told her to ‘take it out of petty cash,’ a phrase I’d heard my father use.

My particular favourites were popular songs from the Thirties like Louis Armstrong’s 1938 Jeepers Creepers. At the time I had no idea how such music was structured. When my mother wasn’t worried about me getting into bad company she worried about me developing bad habits. This included playing popular music by ear. My obvious interest and enjoyment of plonking on any available piano led my parents to buy a piano and arrange ‘proper’ music lessons.

I was sent to a sadistic music teacher. His room was cold in winter and smelled funny. He would sit with his hands tucked down behind the lukewarm radiator while my fingers went white, then blue. After sitting grade one theory and playing through all the levels of practical difficulty, I stopped piano lessons to study for my O Levels. I never went back. At the time, the specks and spots on the stave seemed to bear no relationship to the sounds I could produce by experimentation. It would be many years before they did.

I started playing the piano by ear in D major. This was not planned. These were simply the notes I picked at random while trying to work out the theme for Z Cars. I could only play the top line at first – I had no idea that chords and key changes underlie all melodies. After that I got very interested in swing music. It sounded good to me. On a Thursday night the ‘Light Programme’ (later Radio 2) broadcast an hour of swing from the Big Band Era – which wasn’t all that long ago then. I recorded the shows on a reel-to-reel tape recorder using an air microphone and listened to it many times over the following week. When the next show came along I recorded over the previous one as we only had the one tape. It was annoying when noises off from the rest of the house intruded. I became familiar with Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Chick Webb, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw… and their soloists. The only serious big band I ever heard live was a concert by the Pasadena Roof Orchestra in Leith Town Hall when I was a student. The band dressed in period Twenties outfits and played stuff from the decade before my true era of interest. Me And Jane In A Plane was a poor substitute for Cottontail.

Swing music often used a ‘riff’, a musical phrase repeated with minor alterations over key changes. This structure referenced the origins of the genre in the blues and led me to explore blues as a simpler, more accessible, starting point. I started working things out for both hands on the piano. It became such an obsession that my mother would sometimes lock the piano to force me to do other stuff like homework. Pretty soon I could knock out a repetitive left handed bass while doing my best to add some top line fireworks with my right.

My interest in jazz was noted by the sadistic music teacher and he asked me to give a talk to an openly hostile group of my sixth year contemporaries who more interested in the Rolling Stones than Dave Brubeck. (He was my hero at the time – a farm boy and musical genius.). I could play the first page or so of several numbers and I explained how Brubeck used unusual time signatures (beats to the bar) like 5/4 (Take Five) or 9/8 (Blue Rondo A La Turk) and even 3/4 in the right hand and a 4/4 ragtime left hand bass as in It’s A Raggy Waltz. Most tricky of all was the phenomenal Unsquare Dance in the ridiculous time signature of 7/4. You can hear the drummer Joe Morello laughing in relief at the end of that track.

All this information was received in stony silence by my audience. I got so nervous my hands shook too much to cue the stylus cleanly onto the tracks I was using as illustrations. The jumping and skidding added to the tension. ‘That’s just noise, Stevie.’ said one sullen classmate. ‘Well it helps if you understand it,’ I offered. ‘I don’t want to understand it, I want to enjoy it,’ he said.

If you don’t have a working knowledge of musical theory or interest in developing one, the following bits and pieces may be of limited value!

Changes and Voicings.

In blues and jazz the ‘changes’ are the sequence of keys that lie behind a melody while ‘voicings’ are the harmonic structures of the individual chords of those keys. A chord is a group of notes played simultaneously for their combined effect. Changes and voicings lie behind the melody line that we hear or sing and the whole thing is played in a specific rhythm or number of beats to the bar. A time signature will specify the number of beats to the bar (the top number) and the length of those beats (the bottom number) – usually crotchets or quavers, i.e. 4 or 8. I worked out that the blues used three basic chord changes over a 12 bar verse in 4/4 time. Usually a blues will be in a major key but there are minor blues tunes as well (The Thrill Is Gone, Black Magic Woman, Green Onions).

The first chord of a blues is usually the major triad built on the tonic or root note, and sets the key the blues tune is written in, for example, C major. It is the start and finish point of every verse. There is a system that allocates a roman numeral to each chord in any key. Using this notation you can transpose any tune to another key because the keys and chord structure represented by these numerals remains the same.

The root chord is I. After four bars, the first change of key is to the major chord a fourth interval above the tonic (chord IV, aka the subdominant). In C this would be a change from C to F major and it lasts for two bars. The tune then returns to the root chord (I) for two bars before moving finally to the major chord a fifth interval above the tonic (V, aka the dominant). In C major this would be the key of G major. The subdominant gives you a feeling of progression whilst the dominant compels you back to the root chord. The opening riff of a blues melody is usually repeated in the subdominant with a final, different melodic line, in the dominant section.

|C | | | |F | |C | |G | |C | | = 12 bars

To make things more interesting the structure can be made more complex. In ‘quick change blues’ you put in an extra change to IV in bar 2 then back to I for two bars before returning to IV again. At the end of the verse you can return to I from V via another bar in IV.

|C |F |C | |F | |C | |G |F |C | |

Three changes in major chords is a bit simple, so the next issue to consider is the transition between these changes. Adding a dominant 7th chord in the tonic key leads you naturally up to the subdominant. An augmented (sharpened) 5th also works in some songs. For an even more sophisticated sound ‘fills’ are inserted to occupy the spaces between changes. These are transient detours into other chords, and can be as complicated as you like. They are particularly useful in jazz standards when transitioning to and from ‘the bridge’ (see below). Our quick change 12 bar blues pimped up could now read:

|C |F |C |Gm C7|F |Fm Bb7|Em |Bb A|D |G |Em Ab9|Dm G+ or Db|

It became clear to me that the ‘sharp’ keys; D, A, E, B and F# were not easy for a pianist to work in, especially when attempting boogie-woogie. I am heavily right-handed so anything that makes it easier to execute the complicated business required of the left hand is a big help. For this reason I soon dumped D major and went for C and G instead. By ‘sharp’ keys I mean those that have sharps in their key signatures. The ‘flat’ keys – F, Bb, Eb, Ab, Db and Gb – suit the brass and wind instruments which dominate jazz, particularly the saxophone. These instruments are easier to play in the flat keys, in fact it’s the equivalent of C major on the piano. This usually mystifies guitarists when they play with a brass section.

Jazz tunes generally use ‘cycles of fourths’ rather than the tonic, subdominant, dominant system of a blues. In the flat keys this often takes you to minor keys that are relatively easy to play on the piano – such as the minor keys of C, G and F. In this, pianists and brass players are allies.

Sharp keys made an unwelcome return later in life when I began playing rock music with guitarists. Playing guitar without using a capo is much easier in these sharp keys because strings can be left open rather than using more difficult barre chords. I can play some very basic guitar myself which helps me work out what key we are in by watching the guitarists’ hands. Playing piano in these keys is not impossible, but complicated manoeuvres become tricky. It can limit your vocabulary, making it difficult to shine on your solos. Alternatively, a blues in, say, E can have a unique sound determined by these technical parameters. Ray Charles’ What’d I Say? in E major is an example of this. Meantime, in my early keyboard experiments, I dropped a tone from D to the ‘people’s key’ of C with its boring lack of any black notes in its basic scale.

Blues

I realised that only certain notes in a blues melody sound ‘correct.’ On a piano notes can’t be ‘bent’ the way they can on a stringed instrument. As Thelonious Monk said, ‘There are no wrong notes on a piano.’ But you can slur ‘accidental’ notes into chords to simulate that. An accidental is written as a little note preceding the main chord. When playing blues, a major seventh, the chord that includes the seventh note in the major scale, a semitone below the top do, does not sound right at all, but the minor seventh interval, a full tone below the top do, occurs all the time. When a minor seventh is added to the major triad you have what is called a ‘dominant seventh’ which is used throughout blues and rock music. Similarly, minor thirds feature a lot. In C major these intervals correspond to two ‘black’ notes (Bb and Eb). These are the ‘blue notes’. In contrast to this, major sevenths and other exotica are ubiquitous in jazz music.

As mentioned above, additional chords are inserted into a 12 bar blues to make the changes more interesting. The dominant seventh chord is used to move from the tonic to the subdominant. One of the most jarring intervals in music is the flattened fifth or tritone. This interval is exactly half way between the notes at the top and bottom of an octave consisting of 12 semitones. In C major this would be F# (aka Gb). Interestingly, the dominant seventh chord actually contains a tritone between the second note, a major third, and the fourth note, a minor seventh. In C this is the interval between E and Bb. This chord creates an internal tension that wants to resolve itself to the major chord a fourth above, the subdominant. In the case of C major, C7 goes to F. In addition, when you shift the melody up to the subdominant, a minor third in the tonic key becomes a blue note minor seventh in the new key, allowing you to play a tonic minor chord over the subdominant. In the case of C major, a C minor chord on top of F – a dominant ninth; F9. In swing music and boogie-woogie a sixth interval (e.g. adding in an A to a C major chord) is used a lot. Especially by Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Glen Miller!

Jazz Standards

Obviously, not all music is blues and eventually I began exploring other things. A lot of folk music also seemed to be built on subdominant and dominant chords – only in completely different sequences. As already mentioned, to make the changes applicable to any key, the various chords that can be made from the notes of the diatonic scale can be given roman numerals. ‘I’ is the base key, ‘IV’ the subdominant a fourth above and ‘V’ the dominant. These are all major keys in terms of the first three notes (a major triad). Adding a fourth note to the triad using the other notes of the diatonic scale produces some very non-bluesy chords. I and IV become major sevenths while V is a dominant seventh. II, III and VI are all minor seventh chords and VII is something very peculiar that turns out to be a half-diminished chord, a sort of minor seventh chord with a diminished fifth instead of a perfect fifth. These chords are all widely used in jazz. You can test this stuff if you have a keyboard.

Chords can be enriched satisfactorily by going further up the scale and adding ninths, elevenths and even thirteenths on top, while flattened fifths and ninths occupy strange territories all of their own.

As I moved from blues to working out jazz tunes, I realised all sorts of new changes were possible. In particular, a cycle of fourths starting on the III chord: III VI II V I. The change from a minor key like Dm7 to the major a fourth above (G7) is pleasant to the ear. You could even do VII III VI II V I.

It was years before I realised why minor tunes were written with the key signature of the major key a minor third above it. For example, Cm tunes are written in the same key signature as Eb major. This is because the notes of the C minor scale correspond to the flattened notes in Eb. Cm is therefore the related minor of Eb major. Am is in a similar relationship with C and the scales of those two keys require no sharps or flats at all.

Such relationships are used in popular tunes. The common structure of a jazz standard spans 32 bars consisting of an eight-bar theme (the head) which is then repeated, followed by a middle eight bars in a different key before returning to the theme for the last time; an AABA pattern. A is confusingly referred to as the ‘chorus’ by jazz musicians and B as ‘the bridge’ or middle eight. Melodies can start in a minor key then modulate to the related major – or vice versa.

For example, in the wonderful Take Five written by Paul Desmond for the Dave Brubeck quartet, the key signature is the remote one of Gb containing an alarming six flats. The famous theme starts in the related Eb minor. The middle eight is in the indicated Gb major and starts on the IV chord of Gb major (Bmaj7). It then moves through a cycle of mainly minor keys to Gb. The first time round it stops in Gb but after the second time there is a lovely turnaround as the tune drops to Fsus4, then Bb7 which leads naturally back to Eb minor again.

Other songs do the opposite and start in the major then move to the related minor, for example Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’. I play this in Eb, so the middle eight is in C minor. This is the song that introduced me to the concept of the ‘middle eight’ where a contrasting eight bars links two segments of the basic melody. The transitions between the major and minor segments are also intriguing. In moving from Eb to C minor you can use a D diminished chord then a G7.

To recap; I first thought the ‘flat keys’ like F, Bb, Eb and Ab would be difficult, but most jazz is written for wind instruments like the saxophone which have their easiest fingering in these keys. In addition, when playing standard tunes rather than blues the changes tend to go to convenient keys for the pianist. In Eb, VII III VI II and V translate to Dm Gm Cm Fm and Bb – which is all very straightforward. However, in the sharp keys these changes are extremely awkward. The equivalent changes in E major would be: D#m (Ebm) G#m (Abm) C#m (Dbm) F#m (Gbm) and B.

Example: Undecided (in C major):

This melody involves an enharmonic riff which uses the semitone interval between B and C. In the key of C this is a major seventh, and not a blues interval. In C, B natural is not a blue note. The key then changes up to F exactly as a blues would, but the riff stays the same, now oscillating between a diminished fifth and a fifth relative to F major. This is an example of an enharmonic melody, notes that have a different tonal value when they appear in the scale of another key. Next, the key changes to D7 and the melody is once again repeated over this chord changing the intervals to a sixth and a minor seventh relative to D. In each case the interval between the notes of the tune is a semitone. In the last two bars the key changes to Dm then rapidly to Ab and G7 before returning to C. The two chorus sections are linked by a two bar fill, C Am7 Dm7 G7. Then comes the middle eight: Gm7 alternates with C7 then we move up to F for two bars. Am7 alternates with D7 then up to G7 for two bars, which leads us back to the original riff in C for the final chorus.

Here is a young Ella Fitzgerald taking a languid approach to the piece with the peerless Chick Webb Orchestra.

There was once a ‘battle of the bands’ between the Chick Webb and Benny Goodman outfits. The bands were given the same scores and a curtain concealed their identity from the audience who were then asked to vote. Webb won hands down. He used to hit the drums so hard that they had to be screwed to the floor. Diminutive in stature, he suffered from spinal TB. It was Webb who discovered the teenage Fitzgerald. He succumbed to his disease in hospital with Ella by his side. Apparently he suddenly sat up in bed, said, ‘Gotta go,’ then died.

Here is the same melody and chords in the punning Decidedly by Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan:

It is common practice in jazz to jazz a number on the changes of a standard popular song. Sometimes this is to disguise the tune for copyright reasons. See under How High The Moon and Charlie Parker’s Ornithology or Cherokee and Ko-Ko. Miles Davis declined to play on Ko-Ko as he felt unable to acquit himself well playing that fast.

Straight No Chaser – an example of alternative blues chords:

|F9 | Bb9 | F7 | – | Bb9 | – | F7 | Adim7 D7 | Gm7 | C7 | F7 | – |

Pitch and Key

The key a number is written in influences how it can be played. On the piano the notes fall in specific structural ways in different keys. The fingering of a melody in F is completely different from the same melody payed in E. Following on from the technical difficulties of playing tunes in awkward keys is the concept of pitch. While working things out by ear, I noticed that songs only sound ‘right’ in their correct keys. Take Five (Eb minor) does not sound right if you transpose it to E minor. The question is, do the different keys have a truly distinctive character or are we just detecting the pitch as being the ‘right’ key.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch

Absolute or perfect pitch is the ability to identify and reproduce a note without ‘hunting’ for it. Ludwig Wittgenstein had perfect pitch and he and his brother Paul could identify the pitch of the tram bells passing by their palatial house in Vienna. Paul became a one-armed concert pianist after he was wounded in the First World War. Famous composers wrote left-handed solo piano pieces and concertos for him. He then enraged his generous admirers by rewriting their music! Three of Ludwig’s four brothers committed suicide, so maybe extreme musical talent is a bit of a burden. Those Wittgensteins eh?

I remember a story from a documentary about Vladimir Horowitz who suffered from recurrent prolonged bouts of depression and stage fright. At one point he was returning to the concert platform after an absence of two years. When he began his first piece he was perplexed to find it so difficult. Half-way through he realised he was playing it in the wrong key. The idea that you might be able to transpose a very difficult classical piece to a different key, requiring different fingering, and not realise you were doing that, indicates a depth of musical ability that is bewildering. A central nervous system from another planet.

It is popular to contend that we are all capable of great things. If you get beyond the basic level with any instrument, non-musicians will start saying you should give up the day job. I came to realise, as my progress inevitably slowed, that no matter how long and hard I practised I would never match a classical pianist or a professional jazz player. It is only by gaining some competence as an amateur musician that you can fully appreciate the geniuses among us.

Cricket

I have no idea where my affection for cricket came from. I have always found it easier to hit balls with a bat or a racquet than to kick them, so maybe that’s the reason. Cricket is played by more people in Scotland than play rugby – but obviously both have always been less popular than football. There are localised hot spots in the far north east around the Moray Firth and the more expected, Fife, Lothian and Borders. On my side of the country there was something called the Western League. Like rugby, my introduction to the sport was on BBC black-and-white TV broadcasts in the 1960s. I’m sure England were playing test matches against other countries, but it was the West Indies that dominated my imagination and now, my memory.

England had Geoff Boycott, Colin Cowdrey, John Edrich, Ted Dexter, Tom Graveney, Ken Barrington, John Snow, Derek Underwood and Ray Illingworth; but the West Indies had Wes Hall, Charlie Griffith, Lance Gibbs, Clive Lloyd – and Garfield Sobers. Lloyd and Sobers were my heroes. Lloyd for his astonishing cover fielding and Sobers for everything. I even turned up my collar and tried imitating his bowling style. Hall and Griffiths had murderous pace and I can remember the Charlie Griffith bouncer that felled ‘Deadly’ Derek Underwood on his debut and left him with a large haematoma on his forehead. It seemed shockingly unsportsmanlike at the time.

At secondary school I finally got to play. The standard of kit was appalling, consisting of ancient bats and pads in disintegrating bags. The balls were scuffed into complete anonymity. We were coached by Mr Moffat, who was South African, and later Mr Steinlett who was English. Both of them had played at quite a high level and the team owed its existence to their enthusiasm and commitment.

Mr Moffat taught English and was balding, cerebral and Christian. We seemed terrible unrefined compared to him. Harry Kirkwood, the class’s roughest diamond, enjoyed chewing gum during lessons. ‘Harry! Are you masticating?’ asked Mr Moffat. Harry, bewildered, glanced down at his lap. ‘Me sir? No sir.’

Mr Steinlett was more worldly wise and droll and had played cricket in leagues in the north of England. ‘I once bit myself on the arse, Stevenson,’ he told me as we were preparing for the teachers versus pupils match. As he expected, I was intrigued. ‘OK, how did that happen?’ I asked. Having hooked his fish, he replied, ‘I have a partial denture and I put it in my back pocket for safety during a match. I was fielding at long on and the batsman went for a six. I was back-pedalling to catch it, tripped over the boundary rope and landed on my backside.’

Our pitches were terrible. They were used heavily for football during the winter and the school had nothing resembling a cricket groundsman to effect any kind of repairs for the summer game. The bounce was unplayable, in fact dangerous, and we were reduced to playing all our official matches away from home. The contrast with teams like Ayr Academy, who had a beautiful ground at Doonfoot and were coached by a West Indian professional, was embarrassing. We didn’t even have proper whites or, occasionally, enough willing participants to make up a full eleven. The carpet-like perfection of Ayr’s pitch was a wonder.

The school ran a first and second year team, but from third year onwards there were just first and second elevens to play for. Due to my enthusiasm rather than any ability, I was captain in first and second year. Our abysmal record was the subject of amusement and some derision at school. In the bus on the way home from matches my own team would sing, ‘We want Stevie with a rope around his neck and six feet off the ground!’

Still, we did our best and it soon became clear that cricket was not a game for softies. A cricket ball weighs nearly 6oz and travels at over 100mph when struck. After being hit in the face during a practice, one of our team sustained a detached retina and never came back. During one match, hoping for a catch, I moved our best batsman to short leg. The intended victim promptly smashed one straight onto his knee cap. Our man was carried off. As an enthusiast I was drafted into the first eleven from third year onwards despite being 3 years younger than most of the team. In my fist season we played Kilmarnock Academy. One of their sixth year boys was already playing with seniors in the Western League .

I was simply making up the numbers at this stage, filling unimportant fielding positions and going out to bat well down the order. The Western League boy was bowling when I reached the crease. He was a huge mesomorphic redhead with a hairy chest visible through his partly-undone shirt. I’d never seen anyone take such a long run-up before. He marched off towards the sight screen furiously polishing the ball as I took my guard. ‘Middle and leg please,’ I said in a faint voice. ‘That is,’ said the umpire. The ginger monster turned at his mark and came charging in.

If you’ve never played cricket you will be unaware that the seam on the ball makes a faint noise as it spins. The delivery was travelling so fast I was completely unable to see the thing – but I could hear it buzz past. I made a vague gesture at where I thought it might be, made no contact, and heard it smack into the wicket keeper’s gloves an instant later. All the close fielders ooh-ed and ah-ed to let me know what a close call I’d had. The second delivery went the same way. The third was short and reared up striking me a glancing blow on my right cheek. Later, a bruise came up bearing the imprint of the stitching on the seam. By this time I was in fear of my life. Needless to say in 1969 we wore no helmets. The fourth delivery was a blessed relief. It pitched on a length, went through the gap, and stumps and bails flew in all directions. The close fielders roared their approval and I trudged back to the pavilion wondering if it would be sensible to give up cricket.

Later that season we played Ayr Academy. Again, I was filling gaps in the field and the batting order. The captain put me at square leg just forward of the umpire. The Ayr captain was having a great knock. Suddenly, he smote one on the leg side about six feet off the deck. These things are purely a matter of reaction, and with no time to think, I flew to my right and caught the ball in mid air at full stretch, landing face-down at the umpire’s feet. He signalled that the batsman was out.

My batting contribution that day was another duck and I was a bit down at the post-match cup of tea in Belleisle Park’s imposing mansion house hotel. ‘Never mind,’ said our coach. ‘Today you took a catch you’ll remember for the rest of your days.’

Eventually in sixth year I captained the firsts – such as we were. My batting continued to disappoint but I was a reasonable medium pace bowler. Against Kilmarnock that year I was getting the treatment from their number four and became very frustrated. In desperation I bowled him a full toss. He attempted a hook, but mis-timed it and the half-struck ball came straight back at me for a catch. My momentary joy was dispelled as the ball struck me right on the end of my left index finger and I dropped him. The finger rapidly swelled up into a purple sausage.

I thought I wouldn’t be able to bat, but Kilmarnock went through our order very quickly and I gingerly pulled on my gloves and went out. I wasn’t able to grip the handle firmly with my injured hand. The first delivery reared up and struck me directly on my fat blue finger. The pain was exquisite. Not a game for softies.

I alluded to George Burley (footballer: Ipswich and Scotland) in my piece on rugby. He was two years younger than me and an age group international footballer. In the summer term of my sixth year he decided he wanted to have a go at cricket and turned up for a net in the gymnasium. By this time I felt I could bowl a bit and was skeptical that a complete novice could be competent against an experienced bowler. George picked up the bat and asked me if he was holding it properly. I said yes, he was. He then took up a very professional-looking stance and gazed back at me at the bowler’s end. I began bowling at him as fast and as accurately as I could. With effortless ease he smashed every ball away as if I was sending down underarm lobs at beach cricket. Great sportsmen can turn their hand to anything and are literally in a different league from the also-rans.

My best innings ever was against the teachers – 26 not-out I believe. That match was held at the end of summer term when our meagre numbers had dwindled and some of my batting partners had had to go in twice. I never played again apart from one scratch student match on the Meadows. I clean-bowled my opponent on the first delivery with a full-toss, but the others said that wasn’t fair and he should stay at the wicket. I was told not to bowl any more balls like that.

In 1975 I travelled to Glasgow to see Cowdrey and Denness play at West of Scotland in a benefit for Salahudin. Intikhab Alam, Majid Khan, Asif Iqbal – and Sir Garfield Sobers were also playing. It’s the only time I’ve watched First Class cricketers in action. It was a lovely day and the crowd were excited to see the ageing Cowdrey in action. By this time he was noticeably portly. Acknowledging his warm reception, he cheerfully took his stance and began clipping every delivery to the boundary in an exhibition of matchless class. He needed the merest gesture towards the ball to send it flying to the ropes. What a great sport it is when an overweight forty-something can play like that at the highest level!

In 1981 I was a medical registrar in Dunfermline when Ian Botham (assisted by Gatting, Gower and Willis) had his miracle test series against Australia and the combined attack of Lawson (briefly) and Lillee. We watched as much as we could on the mess TV between clinics, eating and getting bleeped. Botham rescued the series when England were 0-1 down and his ability to swat bouncers over the boundary, seemingly without looking, was astonishing.

After that, my interest in cricket waned and I lost touch with the sport, but the smell of cut grass or linseed oil brings it all back. I don’t think the shortened game is very appealing, aimed as it is at people with a short attention span and no appreciation of the subtleties of a sporting engagement that can last five days.

The First XI in 1970 when I was 16

Wine

Random labels: the Figeac ’83 was not my granny’s legacy bottle, but a subsequent purchase.

My friend Rob and I wanted to try the famous wines, the ones that always seem unjustifiably expensive. Could they really be that much better than our regular, affordable, choices? When our consultant posts separated us by a few hundred miles we decided to each put £5 a month into a wine fund. It was a light financial burden that would allow us to have special wines, with a meal, every year or two. Once the pot had built up, Rob went to his wine merchant in Colchester and asked them if they had anything interesting. In that way we were able to indulge in some spectacular bottles.

My early experience of wine was nil. My whole family were very presbyterian. My father was even an elder of the Kirk. He hardly drank alcohol at all, but he had a very sweet tooth. When he did have a drink he liked Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry, Asti Spumante or a Sauterne called La Flora Blanche. I had tried the sweet Italian fizz, but never the Sauterne. Out for a meal with my then girlfriend and her parents, her father asked me if I had any thoughts on the wine list. The only thought I had was that I recognised the name La Flora Blanche there. I said my father liked it, so a bottle was ordered. Of course it was unbearably sweet and totally unsuitable for drinking with the main course. I was embarrassed.

When my grandmother died, her flat in Ayr was cleared. Like my parents, my grandparents almost never took a drink; my granny’s brother and father having been rather too fond of the stuff. She was always exhorting my mother not to let us have strong drink in case we, ‘got a taste for it.’ Like my parents, they would perhaps risk a sherry at Christmas.

In Granny’s posthumous sideboard were some bottles of wine she’d been given as presents but never consumed. I inherited a bottle of champagne and a bottle of a red wine called Chateau Figeac. Both bottles had been left upright and ignored for years. The vintage of the red was sometime in the sixties; 1962 I think. Some years after acquiring this legacy I chilled the champagne and opened it, only to find the cork had shrunk and the wine was flat. By that time I did know a little bit about wines and the major grape varieties. I knew that fresh air was bad for reds. I reckoned that the Figeac, having been stored in the same way, would be a treacherous bottle to serve to guests and left it in the cupboard under the stairs for a few more years.

My brother came to stay with us while he was between properties. One night, the three of us got carry-out pizzas for supper and I discovered we had run out of our usual red. My eye lit on the Figeac. Here was a chance to try it without fear of letting any dinner guests down – so I opened it. The cork was tight and smelled lovely. I tasted the wine, and it too was lovely. The three of us drank it, reverentially, around the coffee table, over our pizzas. At the time, it was the best red wine I had ever drunk. It was a lesson learned. I checked online while I was writing this piece and the current price quoted for a bottle of 1962 Figeac is £273.

Rob set about doing wine and restaurants with the same enthusiasm and dedication he had brought to fell running, top level chess, military history, castles, birdwatching, abstract expressionism – and medicine. He discovered a restaurant-with-rooms in Kingussie called The Cross, run by Tony and Ruth Hadley.

The restaurant was housed in a charming Victorian shop on the High Street. In the front was seating for pre-dinner drinks around an open fire. The tables were in the rear. Ruth, impossibly, cooked in a tiny galley-type kitchen buried in the depths of the building. The food and accommodation were ridiculously good and ridiculously cheap, although prices rose as the rave reviews and awards followed. At the outset, Rob could save up for a visit by putting his loose change in a jar every day. It was the most fun you could have over a weekend. We went as often as we could, frequently with friends. The scent of birch logs in the air on an autumn afternoon, as we parked the car across the street and checked in, acted as a Pavlovian appetiser. Ruth cooked brilliantly while Tony did front-of-house and the wine. After a marvellous meal, all you had to do was find your bedroom.

I still have the menus, but the food is a topic for another time. The way the Hadleys ran The Cross was very onerous. In addition to the main event of the evening, they did breakfasts every morning. Every year they took a month off to visit their beloved France, recharge their enthusiasm and find new ideas. That is, they did until France restarted nuclear testing in the Pacific. That did it for Tony. To the amazement of national restaurant critics, he stopped buying French wines completely. ‘They aren’t testing their weapons in Entre-Deux-Mers or the Loire,’ he declared.

Rob would pass me his Hugh Johnson Pocket Wine Book annually when he bought a new one, but it was at the Cross that we did our serious wine research. Tony was happy to help out. He once gave us a vertical tasting of three vintages of the New Zealand super star, Cloudy Bay. At the time, some considered it the best Sauvignon blanc in the world. The wines were all gorgeous, and subtly different in character. In 2003 Cloudy Bay was acquired by the champagne house Veuve Clicquot, who increased production and, in my opinion, decreased the quality. I think it is now over-priced for what it is and trading on its illustrious name. We also learned that kicking off an evening with a bottle of methode champenoise between four of us before the meal was perhaps a mistake. On one notable occasion the fizz was a Jansz from Tasmania. By the time we negotiated a ‘flat white’ with the early courses and arrived at the red wine, our powers of discrimination were markedly impaired.

The trouble with wines is that they are consumer goods. You can keep them in a collection like stamps or coins but basically you ought to drink them. Like burning a Picasso, once it’s gone it’s gone, and all you have left is a fading memory. And like twitching, it’s an evanescent pleasure; intense but transient. You can of course keep the labels – like taking photos of a rare bird – but these are just mementos. For a while, we soaked these stylish bits of paper off our favourite bottles, and after a debate about who should have them, stuck them in albums or, in my case, a collage. Chateau Mouton Rothschild would commission famous artists to do their labels which changed with the vintage. Curiously, the labels from the better vintages are less collectible than the poorer years. This is because the less desirable years get drunk quickly and so those labels become rarer. Rob kept the Marc Chagall label from our bottle of Mouton Rothschild 1970.

There is a modest, but excellent, Turkish restaurant near us in Edinburgh which has two framed collections of labels from some of the world’s most famous wines. Wines like Mouton Rothschild, Petrus, Chateau Latour and d’Yquem. I asked the owner and chef, Gursil, where he got them and, rather indignantly, he said, ‘I’ve drunk them all!’ Astonished, I cautiously asked how he could possibly have afforded them. He said he had been a chef in top restaurants in London for many years. High net worth diners would order the most expensive wines on the list as a demonstration of their spending power but frequently left them unfinished!

Other memorable wines from the days of the old rugged Cross included a Tollot Beaut from Chorey-Les-Beaune, a great vintage, of which we eventually finished all the examples in Tony’s cellar. Later we bought other vintages of the same wine but they were never as good. Tony said new, stricter, regulations had been introduced under the appellation d’origines contrôlée (AOC) system which outlawed blending in any grapes from outwith Burgundy. Apparently in the past you could augment your wine with imported grapes from other areas of France, like Bordeaux. The net result of these new restrictions was a thinner, rather disappointing wine.

There was also a stunning Macon Villages Cuvée Botrytis dessert wine. Burgundy is not noted for its sweet wines but in certain years, when the conditions are right, grey botrytis (pourriture noble, or the ‘noble rot’) attacks the Chardonnay grapes. It extracts the water and pushes up the sugar content. In Italian vin santo, the sugar content is increased simply by drying the grapes, while the French sweet wine grapes are actually mouldy. Fermentation proceeds to its maximum, the point where the alcohol content stops the yeast growing, leaving much of the sugar unconsumed. The result is the exquisite sweetness with autumnal ‘fungal’ overtones that make these wines so interesting. Tony told us a tale about the owner of the vineyard concerned. Having found that his grapes had become infected during wet autumn weather, he phoned a pal of his in Sauternes to ask for advice. The pal came to his rescue and they made a unique sweet wine. Researching this phenomenon online, it seems a Cuvée Botrytis is actually a rare, but nevertheless regular, occurrence in the Maconnais.

There is mystery about wine and its country of origin. Wines drunk in situ, where they are produced, always taste better. Chianti Classico, Barbera d’Asti, Barberesco, Altesino and Brunello di Montalcino all taste fabulous in Italy – but when you get home, and buy the same wine in the UK, it never reaches those heights. Is it the weather, or the atmosphere, or do they simply keep the best grapes for themselves? The same is true of the more humble French Rosés. When on holiday in blazing hot Provence they are unbeatable and indispensable. Drunk cold on a chilly June afternoon in Edinburgh they often just make you shudder.

In Edinburgh, our favourite restaurant was Daniel Wencker’s L’Auberge in St Mary’s Street. It is now David Bann’s vegetarian establishment. Before we had children we often went for lunch on a Saturday followed by a pleasantly enhanced shopping trip. As regulars we were known to the staff and I was once asked to minister to one of the trainee chefs who had collapsed in the kitchen.

One day, our waiter came to our table and said, ‘Dr Stevenson, would you know the playwright Arthur Miller if you saw him?’ It was then that I realised that the distinguished-looking, and strangely familiar, man at the next table was Miller. At that time, a season of his plays was running at the Lyceum and Kenny Ireland had taken him and his partner out for lunch. Years later I discovered he had been put up in my cousin’s flat in Northumberland Street which she rented out through the Scottish Arts Council.

At L’Auberge we usually started with a half-bottle of a particular Chablis to accompany the starters. One day, when I asked if we could have it, the waiter said, ‘No you can’t.’ Puzzled, I asked, ‘Why not?’ ‘Because you’ve drunk them all,’ he replied.

The special Rob and Allan Wine Fund trundled along in a satisfactory way but more widely-spaced visits resulted in even greater sums accumulating in the account. We splashed out on increasingly expensive and illustrious stuff. Great white Burgundy, classic Bordeaux reds, stunning Australian reds (like Penfold’s Grange; the bouquet could be detected all the way across the room), and fabulous pudding wines. We had Chateau Gilette (aged in concrete vats), a Chateau Rieussec, and a half bottle of d’Yquem which cost us £61 in the Nineties.

Eventually, children and work commitments made further oenological experiments impractical and reluctantly we wound up the account. Our final round of bottles was the best we could remember and the realisation that we just wanted to repeat those choices next time told us we had reached the end of a very pleasant road. Our final red was from California, a Ridge Monte Bello ’78. This was actually the best red I have ever drunk, better than the Figeac.

It was a great regret that on our trip to Califiornia we weren’t able to fit in a trip to Ridge Vineyards, perched on the Monte Bello Ridge south of San Francisco. In any case, I would have had to drive down there, rendering the visit pointless. Rob’s sister lived in San Francisco for a while and joined the Ridge tasting programme. The vineyard organised vertical tastings of their wines, including the Monte Bello, for their members. These were accompanied by live jazz and a paella cooked en plein air. Rob has been to one of those.

One of the drawbacks of taking a pretentious interest in wine is that kind people inevitably give you special bottles. I usually write the name of the donor on the label, then carefully put it in a rack on the bottom shelf of the dining room cupboard for later consumption, meanwhile carrying on with the usual Cavas, New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs, Riojas and good Italians. Every now and then I might push the boat out and have a Royal Tokaj with dessert.

The wines in this ‘too good to drink cupboard’ have been neglected for fear of another Figeac incident. I have now decided this has to stop. Along with my sense of smell, my palate is definitely deteriorating and those two abilities are inextricably linked. Like me, some of the wines have started fading with age and the fear is that a few may have gone over completely. Therefore, they must be drunk – and we must be drunk – before it’s too late.

Wichita Lineman

Last Friday I went to a concert at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. The legend that is Jimmy Webb was telling anecdotes from his remarkable song-writing career and singing some of his hits. The support was Ashley Campbell, Glen Campbell’s daughter. At the age of 75, the targets he set for his voice were ambitious, and the once dazzling keyboard technique faltered at times, but he was still great. The complexity of his playing is more like a classical musician. He studied music in California, to the distress of his Baptist minister father. He wrote a musical in his sophomore year, then dropped out to become a huge success, winning a Grammy in 1968 aged 22 for By The Time I Get To Phoenix. He is nevertheless a genuine Oklahoma country boy who hoed and picked cotton, and loaded hay bales.

Webb told a great creation myth about Wichita Lineman (1968). Glen Campbell was agitating for a new song from him to follow up the success of By The Time I Get To Phoenix. Webb spent a few hours on an idea then sent it off, incomplete. It had no third verse. He heard nothing for a couple of weeks, then ran into Campbell at a recording studio. Webb eventually asked what he’d thought of the song and Campbell replied, ‘Oh, we cut that.’ ‘But it wasn’t finished!’ said Webb. ‘It is now,’ said Campbell.

I play Lineman on the piano – after a fashion – and sing along as best I can. No one can match Campbell’s fabulous tone and effortless five-octave range but it’s Webb’s chord changes and harmonies that are fascinating. It’s impossible to work out what key you are in – and in that sense it is similar to a classical work.

First we have to mention the bass intro. Carol Kaye was one of the Wrecking Crew group of session musicians as was Glen Campbell. Kaye’s background was in jazz. She and Campbell had played together on countless hits by other artists (California Dreamin’, These Boots Are Made for Walkin’, Be My Baby, The Beat Goes On, Good Vibrations). Glen Campbell even toured with the Beach Boys, replacing Brian Wilson when he was ‘indisposed.’ The Wrecking Crew all had jazz or classical music backgrounds and could (apart from Campbell) sight-read fluently. Kaye used a Fender but also had a distinctive six-string Danelectro bass guitar which Glen Campbell borrowed to play the guitar solo in Lineman. Kaye felt the number needed a strong opening and came up with the classic six-note figure that leads into the opening chords.

Those opening chords cycle between Fmaj7 and (the way I do it) Bb/C. Ah, one thinks, this song is going to be in F because we are switching between the I and V chords, which are the tonic and dominant chords of the key of F. Then the song begins: ‘I am a lineman for the county…‘ and suddenly we are in Bbmaj7. That’s OK, Bb is the IV chord of F, and we will surely soon be home. But then we move through Am to Gm, then Dm, Am, G and D and by the time we go ‘searching in the sun for another overload,’ it all becomes a bit uncertain. Are we in D now? The sheet music key signature is certainly the two sharps of D major.

The chorus follows the verse with more nice inversions. Inversions are chords that don’t have the root note on the bottom and are written with a ‘/’ before the alternative bottom note.

‘I hear you singing in the wire (Cmaj7), I can hear you through the whine (Gmaj7/B, Gm/Bb) and the Wichita Lineman (D/A, G/A) is still on the line…(Bb, C9).’ This is where Webb puts in the little morse code reference with a repeated high D when the lineman is, ‘still on the line.’ A normal song would now return to the key of D that we assume we are in – but instead we have Bb/C and we head off in the direction of F once more. The Campbell guitar solo over the verse leads us to another sung chorus (there is no third verse – it’s an unfinished song). The finale is a fade out on the Bb/C9 cycle with big strings and horns on top.

The miracle is how the melody flows naturally through these unusual chord changes without any tension. Lineman remarkable not only for the voicings and changes but for the depth of emotion expressed in the lyrics. Webb gives us a telegraph engineer with the soul of a poet.

The Colour-Blind Blues

Ishihara: It’s 74 – or is it 21 or nothing?

I am red-green colour-blind. I am a ‘deutan’ meaning I have deuteranomaly, the commonest form of the disorder, which affects about 8% of men of Northern European ancestry. Apparently this is because my green-sensitive retinal cones don’t work properly. It is all my mother’s fault – or even my grandmother’s fault. Like haemophilia, scourge of the Romanovs, colourblindness is an X-linked genetic disorder; meaning women are usually asymptomatic carriers, protected by their paired normal Xs, while men, with only a pathetic Y to pair up with their single X, have no such protection. There is some evidence that carrier women, expressing both the normal and abnormal Xs, have enhanced colour vision, known as tetrachromacy. Apparently they can see two different kinds of red. Trichromacy is normal colour vision.

If a woman carrying the gene has a child with a normal man, there is a 50% chance her sons will be colour-blind and a 50% chance any daughters will be carriers. My grandmother passed the abnormal X (X’) to my mother and also her son, my uncle, who was colour-blind. My mother passed her X’ on to two of her three sons; a run of bad luck in the family – but not as bad as haemophilia.

In the reverse situation, where the father is a sufferer (X’Y) and has children with a normal (XX) woman, all his daughters will be carriers, but his sons, to whom he gives his benign Y, will be normal. However, if a colour-blind man (X’Y) has a child with a carrier woman (X’X) there is a 50% chance their daughters will have two abnormal X chromosomes. This is the main reason 0.5% of women have the disorder, and it is usually in a profound form.

My parents (I say parents but I was raised by my mother, my father was always too busy to bother with us) twigged that something was amiss fairly early on. I seemed to be incapable of learning my colours properly. The school was onto it too and I was sent off to Ayr to be tested. I did the Ishihara tests like the one above – and I was all over the shop. I saw numbers that weren’t there and I couldn’t see the numbers that were there. By contrast, they told me I had done surprisingly well on the tests that required you to arrange little discs of colour in order as they went from one shade to another. They couldn’t explain this. They then gave me a list of occupations I was now debarred from; things like a commercial or military pilot, a pathologist or an officer above sergeant in the signals corps. I immediately developed a yearning to be any or all of those people. Doors had been closed to me at a very early age.

I am able to see some frequencies of red, so I do not live in an entirely drab world. Other shades of red just look dark green to me and spectacular rhododendrons with dark red flowers can look all-green. I sometimes have to look for the flowers as separate structures from the leaves. Problems also arise with colours that are mixtures of other colours, so that some purples look blue to me and browns look the same as green. The reds had dropped out of the mix.

In art classes at school I was careful to ask my nearest classmate to tell me which was the brown crayon and which the green. I carefully placed them on opposite sides of the desk so that my trees would look correct. We were once asked to do a design for wallpaper. I decided to go for a Chinese theme. The teacher came round the class looking at our efforts. When she came to me she said, ‘That’s very nice Allan, bit why have you plumped for such conventional colours? Why not have blue trees with yellow leaves?’

At secondary school my favourite teacher, Mr Harrison who taught biology, had monochrome vision. His abnormal X’ must have carried an extreme form of the condition. I remember him asking us why certain colours didn’t go together. He was unable to understand the concept.

Whenever the subject of my colourblindness cropped up, people always started pointing to various nearby objects and asking me what colour they looked to me. This became very tedious. I couldn’t think of a witty response that would get me out of answering them. From birth, I have had patches of white hair among the brown on the left side at the back of my head. This too became a subject for enquiry, so I started saying that my mother had been frightened by an Ayrshire cow when she was pregnant. Similarly, when challenged for smoking cigarettes as a medic I would look shocked and say, ‘They’re not bad for you, are they?’

There did not seem to be any advantages to my condition. Since I had some concept of normal vision, when shown shades of green or pink, I knew what they should look like and could switch my perception of them back and forth from green to pink depending on what people told me I was looking at. It’s not much of a trick – and one that is entirely in the eye of the beholder. These problems did not stop me painting but the results tended to look a bit odd to normal-sighted types.

I played cricket at school, a red ball on a green pitch, but I seemed to manage OK. Years later I read a paper about this. They looked at whether red-green colour blindness was a handicap to cricketers and found that there was a slight but definite preponderance of red-green colour-blindness among first class batsmen compared to the general population. Ian Botham, for example, is red-green colour-blind. It seems a fast-moving object is perceived in monochrome because the colour-sensitive cones in your retina don’t react quickly enough. It’s those monochrome rapid rods that see the ball coming. So why would a colour-blind person see the ball a bit better than a normal? Is it because they generally rely less on colour? There is also evidence that colour-blindness helps you identify camouflaged objects, perhaps because you depend more on pattern recognition than colour.

Even if I couldn’t fly a plane, I was allowed to drive. In some countries I wouldn’t be. Here there was a potential problem. Traffic lights and brake lights are quite important. It’s easy to learn that the red light is always at the top of traffic lights – and anyway it looks completely different to me from the whitish green light at the bottom. However, I don’t see much difference between red and amber. Similarly, with brake lights, they look the same shade as side lights and indicators to me. I have to specifically look for red stop lights and brake lights as they don’t really stand out to me among all the other street lights – especially on dark rainy nights.

I can hardly claim to be handicapped. Indeed, if colour-blindness was a significant detriment to sufferers we would eventually die out. Instead, it persists. Sickle cell trait confers protection against malaria, so perhaps colour-blind hunters were better at identifying hidden quarry. I do inhabit a drabber world than the rest of you, but I cannot do anything about that.

The special glasses that claim to restore your colour vision are negatively reviewed online and I haven’t bothered trying them. Wikipedia has a list of my illustrious fellow-sufferers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_color_blindness

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